TORONTO — As the Toronto Maple Leafs start settling into life under Craig Berube over the next few weeks, they will soon learn that their new head coach arrives with two non-negotiables for players on his roster.
You must work hard.
You must compete.
“When players aren’t working and they’re not competing, they’re going to have an issue, OK?” Berube said Wednesday at the outset of what he hopes will be an identity-establishing training camp.
“That’s unacceptable in my opinion.”
Emerging from an offseason where upper management proclaimed that everything was on the table when it came to potential changes, Berube stands as the most seismic shift the team ended up making following yet another first-round playoff exit.
In hiring the straight-talking son of Calahoo, Alta., to replace Sheldon Keefe, the Leafs placed their faith in his Stanley Cup bona fides and reputation for bringing teams together.
Ask anyone about Berube who has spent time working with him or playing for him and you’ll quickly hear about his knack for making the 23rd man on the roster feel just as important as the resident superstar. He’s not known for playing mind games and he’s no fan of pomp and circumstance. He’d simply rather walk through the front door and address any simmering issues head-on.
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What that means in Toronto, team president Brendan Shanahan mused at the start of a long season, is, “I don’t know that it’s going to be smooth every day.”
While that may not exactly be new for an organization that has gone 1-8 in playoff series dating to 2017, there’s clearly a belief that making a change behind the bench after nearly five years under Keefe could spark a breakthrough.
Berube was at the helm when the 2018-19 St. Louis Blues made their near-mythical run to a Stanley Cup title after sitting in last place a couple of months into the season. He took over partway through that campaign and helped the players rebuild confidence while turning the team into a four-line machine that churned through opponents.
Berube noted that he never had the kind of elite-level talent he’ll be working with in Toronto during those days in St. Louis. It’s expected that he’ll start Thursday’s practice sessions with Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner together on one line, William Nylander centring Max Domi on another and John Tavares down the middle of a third.
The coach’s goal isn’t to discourage those players from attacking offensively or using their instincts to try and break games open. But he will establish clear expectations about how they need to react when a play gets broken up or a puck gets turned back the other way at the offensive blue line.
“I’m not here to take the sticks out of these guys’ hands, but there’s got to be an identity to how we want to play,” Berube said. “That means we want to play a north-south game. We want to be a hard team to play against. We want to check.”
The ideas themselves may not be revolutionary, but in Toronto they could make a significant difference if correctly absorbed and applied.
It’s not as if Keefe didn’t recognize his team’s shortcomings.
Arguably the biggest takeaway from the Amazon “All or Nothing” series, where cameras were granted unfettered access to the Leafs throughout the 2020-21 season, was that the former coach diagnosed many of the issues that cropped up during a playoff meltdown against the Montreal Canadiens but couldn’t eliminate them.
While the Leafs have earned a reputation as a team that can’t get the job done when it really counts in the spring, they’ve won more regular-season games than all but the Boston Bruins, Colorado Avalanche and Carolina Hurricanes across the past five NHL seasons.
Berube’s ultimate job is to bridge that disconnect.
The one advantage he’ll have over his predecessor is a blue line that looks a little more ready to withstand the playoff grind after the free-agent signings of Chris Tanev, Oliver Ekman-Larsson and Jani Hakanpää. The Leafs also added goaltender Anthony Stolarz to platoon with Joseph Woll after seeing him produce encouraging numbers with the Florida Panthers last season, while bringing in veterans Max Pacioretty and Steven Lorentz on tryouts to potentially augment the forward group.
“I think we’ve improved our roster,” said general manager Brad Treliving. “You don’t hit grand slams every day. Sometimes you’ve just got to keep hitting singles and doubles and picking away at your roster. Getting better isn’t because you airlift in a bunch of new people; internal growth is the best way to get better in this league.
“It’s not just flying in the great free agent or making 10 trades.”
Berube is the talisman as the Leafs give it at least one last go with the Core Four, and he’s got seven months to try and steel them together before the entire program is put on trial under the playoff pressure cooker yet again.
The No. 1 reason a team constructed around high-end forwards has had so little success in that environment is that the goals have consistently and perplexingly disappeared as soon as they’ve arrived there.
Years after the rebuild that brought this core together ended, it remains an open question about whether they’re capable as a group of digging in and pushing through when the games are hardest.
More than that, can any coach compel them to do so?
In Berube, the Leafs players will find a leading voice who won’t sugarcoat any situation or leave anyone guessing about where they stand. He intends to put them through an extremely competitive training camp over the next few weeks, and he won’t be afraid to use the stick if he finds anyone skirting the non-negotiables.
“Everybody’s got to be held accountable, including me,” he said. “It starts with me, obviously.”
(Photo: Nick Lachance / Getty Images)
